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Saturday, 29 November 2014

“Good actions give strength to
ourselves and inspire good actions in others.”

- Plato

You’ll feel good and you’ll get what you did to others. Doing good things will
always bring good things to you.

“We make a living by what we get, but
we make a life by what we give.”

- Winston Churchill

Smile
when you give, it will change a lot of things inside you. Give with a good
heart and without any means to get anything back.

When
I say don’t think about getting anything back, I do mean it. If you expect
something to come back, it won’t. Sorry, but giving without expecting anything
back, it means without expecting anything back. Now you’ll say, how can I know
if this is working if I don’t look out for what shall come back. If you need to
know, then you haven’t done it without expecting anything back.

This
is simple, but a lot of people don’t believe in this and just don’t trust it to
work. So they end up destroying anything good they’re doing because they expect
it to come back.

“As I got out of the car, this woman came up with this
baby and said, ‘My dad is in there! My dad is in there!’ I didn’t know what to
do. I felt so helpless," Beth Lederach, who recorded the footage of the
successful rescue, told the Fresno
Bee.

The video shows the man walk into the smoke and
flames. At one point, a crash or explosion sends other would-be rescuers
fleeing, but not the hero, who emerges from the blaze with the 73-year-old man
draped over his shoulder.

Little is known about the rescuer except that he seems
to be a Dodgers fan, at least based on his cap. ABC News reports that he was
checked out at a local hospital
after the rescue. But then, he seems to have vanished.

The man who was rescued, Robert Wells, told KFSN-TV
that he was connected to an oxygen tank and had difficulty escaping the fire.
He said two people tried to help him, to no avail.

That
story is an extreme example of giving without expecting anything in return.

Here’s
another nice story I found.

*******

Doing Good for Others, Does Good for You

I slipped through the revolving door of the office
building I worked in and stepped onto the cracked sidewalk that lined Broad Street in Newark, New
Jersey. A light drizzle and a depressing grey sky
enhanced the depravity of the area. The buildings on both sides of the street
were old and in need of repair or, in some instances, a wrecking ball.

A few seconds later, a woman wearing a coat four sizes too big for her -
probably a throw away from the used clothing store down the street - stepped up
to me, displayed a smile of many gaps and begged, "Mister, can you help a
person out? I haven't eaten in almost two days."

I handed her a few quarters and watched her saunter off. She held her hand out
as she walked and counted the change she'd collected on that dreary afternoon.
I guessed food was the furthest thing from her mind - crack was more her line
of nutrition.

That area and most of Newark were poverty stricken and ruled by drugs and
crime.In the few short months I worked there, I'd witnessed a stolen car,
pursued by police, turn a corner and hit another car head on. The thieves leapt
from the wreckage and ran off with the police in hot pursuit. A month after
that, a man's car was stolen from the parking lot behind our building while he
negotiated the fee with the attendant. This was a place where you held your
belongings tightly and didn't venture far after dark.

I walked to the corner, stopped by the door of the ATM machine, checked to be
sure no one followed close and quickly slipped my bank card into the slot.
There was a buzz and click as the door unlocked. I walked inside and made sure
no one stepped in behind me.

I put my card into the machine and deposited my paycheck with a sigh of relief.
As I turned to leave, I saw a wallet sitting on the counter. It sat next to a
pen on a chain so thin a kitten could have snapped it. The wallet was brown,
well used and contained three dollars, a driver's license, two credit cards, a
bank card and a work permit from the United States Citizenship and
Immigration Services. The name on the license was one I would not attempt to
pronounce, but whoever he was, he was going to be in a panic over a wallet with
his identification on it being lost in this city.

I put it in my pocket, walked to Penn Station and took the train home to Jersey City. In my
apartment, I checked the online phone book and found no one to match the name
on the cards in the wallet. I wanted to help the guy. If it had been my wallet,
I would have been sick to my stomach with worry. I picked up the bank card and
had a thought. On the back was the number to his bank.

"Thank you for calling Wachovia Bank. My name is Cindy, how may I help
you?" "Hi, Cindy. I found a man's wallet at one of your bank machines
today and am trying to track down the owner to return it to him."

"That's very nice of you sir. Can you give me the number on the card
please?" I gave her the number. "Sir, that card has been reported
stolen."

"I'm sure it has, but what he did was leave it on the shelf in the room
where the ATM is. Can you give me his phone number? I want to arrange to meet
with him to return his wallet."

"I'm sorry, sir, but we cannot give out the personal information of our clients."

"I understand. Can I give you my contact information? You could call him
and tell him who I am."

"I can certainly do that, Sir."

I gave her my information and hung up.

I'd done all I could.

Two days later, a very thankful gentleman appeared at our front desk and
received his belongings. He never dreamed he would see his wallet again, not
one left at a bank machine in Newark.

I smiled all day long. Doing good for others, does good for you.

When you do something without any
expectation on getting anything back, you don’t feel the need to know if
anything will come back to you. And it will come back.

The good felling
of doing it is what a lot of people will take as the return in doing it, but
it’s only a part of what’s coming back. In the Wicca they have a rule of three.
It means that what ever you send outside will come back to you three times.
What this means, is that you’ll get back more then what you give away. It
doesn’t mean you’ll get it back right away. It means that it will come back. If
you do something with an egocentric mind, then you’ll get people treating you
as that. Egocentric will do things for other because they expect to get back
more.

Don’t
be egocentric and give away without expecting anything more then the good
feeling of doing it.

Friday, 7 November 2014

Even if you
don’t consciously know your habits, they exist and influence your life.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not
an act, but a habit.”

- Aristotle

The nice thing here is that you can consciously define your habits and change
them. Changing them will help you choose better ones.

“Winning is not a sometime thing; it's an all time thing.
You don't win once in a while, you don't do things right once in a while, you
do them right all the time. Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.”

- Vince Lombardi

The biggest
difference between someone successful and someone who’s not is the habits they
choose to have in their life.

What are
those habits for success?

From the
book “The seven habits of highly effective people” by Stephen R. Covey.

Independence:

-Be
proactive: Take initiative in life by realizing that your decisions (and how
they align with life’s principles) are the primary determining factor for
effectiveness in your life. Take responsibility for your choices and the
consequences that follow.

-Begin
with the end in mind: Self-discover and clarify your deeply important character
values and life goals. Envision the ideal characteristics for each of your
various roles and relationships in life.

-Put
first things first: A manager must manage his own person. Personally. And
managers should implement activities that aim to reach the second habit. Covey
says that rule two is the mental creation; rule three is the physical creation.

Interdependence

-Think
win-win: Genuine feeling for mutually beneficial solutions or agreements in
your relationships. Value and respect people by understanding a “win” for all
is ultimately a better long-term resolution than if only one person in the situation
had gotten his way.

-Seek
first to understand, then to be understood: Use empathic listening to be
genuinely influenced by a person, which compels them to reciprocate the
listening and take an open mind to being influenced by you. This creates an atmosphere
of caring, and positive problem solving.

-Synergize:
Combine the strengths of people through positive teamwork, so as to achieve
goals no one person could have done alone.

Continuous
improvements

-Sharpen
the saw: Balance and renew your resources, energy, and health to create a
sustainable, long-term, effective lifestyle. It primarily emphasizes exercise
for physical renewal, prayer (meditation, yoga, etc.) and good reading for
mental renewal. It also mentions service to society for spiritual renewal.

Tuesday, 4 November 2014

Never underestimate the power of doing
something good. Being kind should never be seen as a negative way of being. Be
kind all the time.

“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever
wasted.”

- Aesop

Yes, if you’re doing something kind without any hope of getting something back
in return, then you’re truly a kind person.

Even kindness done to make a show is
still a good thing.

This is a story I found online. I just
love this one. Simple and so powerful.

Today You, Tomorrow Me

--by Justin Horner, posted Mar 10, 2011

During this past year I’ve had three instances of car
trouble: a blowout on a freeway, a bunch of blown fuses and an out-of-gas
situation. They all happened while I was driving other people’s cars, which for
some reason makes it worse on an emotional level. And on a practical level as
well, what with the fact that I carry things like a jack and extra fuses in my
own car, and know enough not to park on a steep incline with less than a gallon
of fuel.

Each time, when these things happened, I was disgusted
with the way people didn’t bother to help. I was stuck on the side of the
freeway hoping my friend’s roadside service would show, just watching tow
trucks cruise past me. The people at the gas stations where I asked for a gas
can told me that they couldn’t lend them out "for safety reasons,"
but that I could buy a really crappy one-gallon can, with no cap, for $15. It
was enough to make me say stuff like "this country is going to hell in a
handbasket," which I actually said.

But you know who came to my
rescue all three times? Immigrants. Mexican immigrants. None of them spoke any
English.

One of those guys stopped to help me with the blowout
even though he had his whole family of four in tow. I was on the side of the
road for close to three hours with my friend's big Jeep. I put signs in the
windows, big signs that said, "NEED A JACK," and offered money.
Nothing. Right as I was about to give up and start hitching, a van pulled over,
and the guy bounded out.

He sized up the situation and called for his daughter,
who spoke English. He conveyed through her that he had a jack but that it was
too small for the Jeep, so we would need to brace it. Then he got a saw from
the van and cut a section out of a big log on the side of the road. We rolled
it over, put his jack on top and we were in business.

I started taking the wheel off, and then, if you can
believe it, I broke his tire iron. It was one of those collapsible ones, and I
wasn’t careful, and I snapped the head clean off. Damn.

No worries: he ran to the van and handed it to his
wife, and she was gone in a flash down the road to buy a new tire iron. She was
back in 15 minutes. We finished the job with a little sweat and cussing (the
log started to give), and I was a very happy man.

The two of us were filthy and sweaty. His wife
produced a large water jug for us to wash our hands in. I tried to put a 20 in the man’s hand, but he
wouldn’t take it, so instead I went up to the van and gave it to his wife as quietly
as I could. I thanked them up one side and down the other. I asked the little
girl where they lived, thinking maybe I’d send them a gift for being so
awesome. She said they lived in Mexico.
They were in Oregon
so Mommy and Daddy could pick cherries for the next few weeks. Then they were
going to pick peaches, then go back home.

After I said my goodbyes and started walking back to
the Jeep, the girl called out and asked if I’d had lunch. When I told her no,
she ran up and handed me a tamale.

This family, undoubtedly poorer than just about
everyone else on that stretch of highway, working on a seasonal basis where
time is money, took a couple of hours out of their day to help a strange guy on
the side of the road while people in tow trucks were just passing him by.

But we weren’t done yet. I thanked them again and
walked back to my car and opened the foil on the tamale (I was starving by this
point), and what did I find inside? My $20 bill! I whirled around and ran to
the van and the guy rolled down his window. He saw the $20 in my hand and just
started shaking his head no. All I could think to say was, "Por favor, por
favor, por favor," with my hands out. The guy just smiled and, with what
looked like great concentration, said in English: "Today you, tomorrow
me."

Then he rolled up his window and drove away, with his
daughter waving to me from the back. I sat in my car eating the best tamale
I’ve ever had, and I just started to cry. It had been a rough year; nothing
seemed to break my way. This was so out of left field I just couldn’t handle
it.

In the several months since then I’ve changed a couple
of tires, given a few rides to gas stations and once drove 50 miles out of my way to
get a girl to an airport. I won’t accept money. But every time I’m able to
help, I feel as if I’m putting something in the bank.

“Treat those who are good with goodness, and also treat those who are not
good with goodness. Thus goodness is attained. Be honest to those who are
honest, and be also honest to those who are not honest. Thus honesty is
attained.”

- Lao Tzu

Be good with everyone and all the time. You’re never too good. Those who can’t
accept your good action will remember it the longest. In the end, good always
bring back good.